Thursday, August 13, 2009

Final Crisis Fallout

In Red Robin #3 this week, Tim Drake stands in a graveyard and tries to explain to his good friend Cassie (Wonder Girl) why he feels so different. She believes it's just the death of Batman that has him out-of-sorts, but Tim doesn't even think he's dead.

No, instead we find out, that in the gory dark crapfest that was Final Crisis, our dear sweet Robin was captured and covered with one of Darkseid'sJustifier helmets. He heard the Anti-Life Equation.

I'm not sure this makes sense. Granted, Robin wasn't in Final Crisis. At all. So he could have been anywhere. And he was acting all tortured in Battle for the Cowl, but that could just be chalked up to grief for Bruce.

More importantly, in the pictures in Red Robin #3 that show him being caught, and helmet-ified, he's wearing his old Robin suit with the added cowl. He only put that cowl on after he had been pretty badly burnt, when he went to fight the new Anarky at the end of his own now-dead Robin series. And THAT fight, that whole arc, took place after Batman died, when Tim was trying to calm the gang warfare and violence that erupted in the wake of Batman's disappearance.

So it doesn't add up right? If he has the cowl on, Bruce is already dead. Bruce died at the end of Final Crisis, and Robin fought the gangs to restore control, thus putting on the cowl.

I suppose there is a small window of time here, in the very last issue of Final Crisis. But I don't like it, not one bit. Grant Morrisson already killed Batman. He had him use a gun and then fried to him a crisp. Did his depressing storyline have to directly touch Tim? Who has already had so much grief and pain? Did he need that stupid suicide-inducing equation to make him more complex, or troubled? Starfire is dealing with he same issues over in Titans, but she's going to a psychiatrist and freaking out....also we actually saw her in Final Crisis, but never Tim.

No. In my opinion, this is the first misstep in the so far stellar work of Chris Yost on this series. The kid's lost pretty much everything you can lose, and now that Blackest Night is here, he's going to have to fight and talk to his dead, homicidal, resurrected parents. Isn't that enough torture?